


one foot in the battledome

by Ink_Beneath_Her_Fingernails



Series: back in black [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Betaed, Black Paladin Pidge | Katie Holt, Blanket Permission, Blood and Injury, Embedded Images, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Explanations of Some Tagged Warnings in Author's Note, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Gladiators, Imprisonment, Murder, Pidge Angst Bang 2020, Pidge | Katie Holt Angst, Podfic Welcome, Prisoner of War, author cherry-picks canon and throws the rest into the unforgiving vacuum of space, suicide ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-09
Updated: 2020-12-09
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:55:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27798841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ink_Beneath_Her_Fingernails/pseuds/Ink_Beneath_Her_Fingernails
Summary: She leaves the Garrison at fourteen, a bitter child with everything to prove and nothing to lose and only one goal left in life.She returns nine years later, twenty-three and jaded; she's an adult now, and nobody cheers to see her again because she arrives with a war on her heels.The man who began it is dead, she's made sure of that, but his legacy lives on and the cosmos pay the price in pounds of flesh and blood.(Or: Pidge, surviving a day at a time.)
Relationships: Colleen Holt & Pidge | Katie Holt, Pidge | Katie Holt & Everyone, Pidge | Katie Holt & Ulaz, Pidge | Katie Holt & Zarkon
Series: back in black [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2044909
Comments: 3
Kudos: 18
Collections: Pidge Angst Bang





	one foot in the battledome

**Author's Note:**

> **TW:** major character death, kidnapping/abduction/capture, P.O.W., imprisonment, semi-graphic violence, blood, injury, murder, recovery, gladiators*, emotional/psychological abuse, suicide ideation ******
> 
>  ***** so, fighting to the death for the entertainment of others  
>  ****** she does not contemplate _actively_ committing suicide, but it is made blatantly clear that she does not have much regard for her own life or care much if she dies, and _does_ at one point contemplate _letting_ herself be killed. tagging to be on the safe side.
> 
> **please let me know if there are any other warnings you think I missed.**
> 
> huge, huge, _huge_ thank you to [Loz](https://extrasensorious-zoroark.tumblr.com/) for the absolutely _gorgeous_ [art for this fic](https://extrasensorious-zoroark.tumblr.com/post/637035468359352320/drew-these-to-go-with), and [Moo](https://doughnuts-5ever.tumblr.com/) for being a _wonderful_ beta!! y’all were just fantastic to work with!! also a big thanks to the amazing mods of the Pidge Angst Bang for putting on this event! y’all did a great job and it was so much fun!!
> 
> there are two pieces of art and a cover piece embedded in this fic. image descriptions are in the end-notes.

"Did you know that the Lions of Voltron were formed from a reality comet? A comet, ever-burning, never dying, stuck halfway between our universe and the next. Not just the Lions, either, but the armor, the bayards, everything. That's one thing that no one ever seems to understand. No matter what anyone tells you, Voltron is not Altean. It is not Galran or Dalterion, not Nalquid, nor Rygnirathan. Voltron is all of these things, is none of them. Voltron hails at once from the entire universe and from none of it. That is why it is considered such a great weapon."

A moment of silence passes, and the emperor takes a deep breath in and out, eyes closed for a second as if savoring it. He takes his time before speaking again.

"I know that you think you've done something here; that by sacrificing yourself you're somehow preventing your team's fall. Maybe, for now, you're right. Maybe you've bought them time. But what you don't seem to realize is that you're finished, now. That is all the beginning that is needed. Like the comet they came from, the original Paladins didn't fall in a night."

_But fall they did._

"I'm not interested in your stories."

"They're not stories."

Pidge knows it's the reaction he wants from her, but she can't help the pause this brings her anyway.

"... Then what are they?" She says, and hates herself for asking.

Zarkon grins, and she wants to pretend she's almost used to it now, already, but it's a terrifying, terrifying thing.

And he answers, "The truth."

* * *

"If I know Allura," Zarkon says, and it's like someone drove an ice pick through her spine.

Because— _If I know Allura_ —

Zarkon... does, doesn't he?

Pidge has never really thought about it before, but he _knows_ Allura, as more than just an enemy or an inconvenience.

And that means that Allura probably knows him, too, doesn't it?

Because some random Emperor didn't just wipe out her race and destroy her planet. Her father's best friend did.

Pidge's parents' best friends are like aunts and uncles to her.

For Allura, this whole situation really must be a trifecta of horror. She's displaced in time and place, with only one person from her old life still with her and her entire family, culture, world, and all her friends obliterated and nothing more than dust in a millennium-old space grave. 

And someone who might as well have been her uncle, who she trusted—who they _all_ trusted—was the person directly responsible for it, who proceeded to sully their legacy through propaganda and carrying out the same atrocities against so many others. She's one of three left that still speak her native language, sharing that dubious honor with what’s essentially her weird uncle and an evil space witch, and she was forced to destroy the last surviving memories of her father. No matter how long she's been training for, the duty to finish this war once and for all has been dumped heavy on her shoulders.

All this, when she is barely more than a teenager—and all brought about by someone everyone in her life had told her for years she could _trust_.

That relationship isn't a one-way street, and even so, it had been Zarkon who did that to her; Zarkon who was willing to destroy all that and more.

He doesn’t just burn bridges, he sets the damn river banks on fire.

"She would be fitting for any of the Lions. They would all be happy to take her. The Green Paladin will fly again. The only problem here... is where you fit in when they find you again."

Pidge doesn't know about that. There seems to be a lot of possible problems with Allura becoming a Paladin.

It could be potentially harmful to their team dynamics, for one thing.

The Black Paladin is supposed to be the head of Voltron, the leader. They all take orders from Allura, though; her and Shiro act as something like co-leaders, with the rest of the Paladins following their direction when needed. Could Allura give up that portion of her control in the midst of a battle? She could bond with the team and work in unison with them, of that Pidge has no doubt, but they need to be a cohesive unit, acting all at once. They can't hesitate because they're trying to take orders from two different places at once, and Allura is much more likely to give orders relating directly to their literal movements when she's one of the people making them, and not general directions.

Furthermore, if that starts to happen, it'll put a strain on the interpersonal relationships of the team even outside of the field. Either Shiro could get frustrated with Allura not following any of his orders, or Allura will get mad that they won't take hers as readily. The others would just get exasperated with the bickering that would pop up in the field and downtime even more often than usual, and possibly do their best to avoid the two leaders so as not to get caught up in their infighting. Probably all of the above.

Even when looking past that (horribly likely) possibility, who would pilot the Castleship? Who would make the wormholes when they need a quick getaway in the middle of a battle?

Neither of their resident Alteans have given any indication that Coran is able to operate the ships the same way as Allura does, and that's a skill set that they can't afford to lose.

Even if they _could_ have Coran piloting the Castleship and operating the wormholes, that wouldn't be an ideal situation. Coran's usually their eyes in a fight, seeing everything at once, coming up with new strategies, researching, giving them vital information where their childhoods on an isolated planet might leave them lacking, keeping them updated on numbers and locations, distress signals and weapons or movements being made and brought into play by enemies and allies alike.

There's no telling if he'd be able to fill in for Allura's current duties at the same time, or how that would affect his efficiency and effectiveness in either position. If he misses something because he's busy targeting the Castleship's missiles or something and the others aren't prepared to stop relying on his constant intel...

That's the sort of thing that can get people killed.

She's suddenly much less sure of her choice to let herself be captured.

And—

Pidge knows he's just trying to get under her skin, alright?

She knows that everything that comes out of Zarkon’s mouth is poisonous and corrupting, knows that she shouldn't give anything he says any weight at all, that she should take it with a grain of salt at most and only if she's looking to get maimed. Any scrap of kindness or mercy she finds in his words comes only in the form of mind games or her trying to see something where it isn't. She should ignore it, completely, shouldn't give it any consideration at all.

She _knows_ all this, but it's a lot harder to do in practice than it is in theory.

Because—well, the one thing Pidge can't deny is that Zarkon's been around a lot longer than she has. He's known a lot more Alteans for a lot longer than she has, too—had been a frequent guest at the Castle for years in his youth. She'd be foolish not to consider the possibility that he knows the inner workings of the ship inside and out.

(She'd be foolish not to consider the possibility that he knows _Coran's_ mind inside and out, too. The King's closest ally and his most trusted advisor—his two best friends. It's not like they'd have been strangers.)

He says _the only problem here_ and she can't help but want to take that sentence and _run_ with it.

It would be so, so easy, for that to have been a lie, an exaggeration, or just an off-handed, flippant turn of phrase—or a very carefully and intentionally worded statement just to get her hopes up and find a way to brutally crush them later. But she still wants to _believe_ it, that the only problem will be her finding a place with the team if she ever gets back to them, that somehow they can figure it out, that they have contingencies in place just for this, that Coran is fully capable of opening wormholes and flying the Castleship, and can still find a way to get them their usual support at the same time, that with time the team can smooth over any rough patches they stumble across and adjust to any new dynamics as needed. She has to trust them to be able to do these things without her.

She just needs something to hold onto. So yes, dear lord, does she want to believe it, with all her heart.

She thinks she can live with not having a place if her team turns out okay.

* * *

They put her in the arena.

She stands in line to enter the gladiator ring and almost wishes that she had a Shiro to take out her knee. (But she didn't bring anyone here with her, and that's worth her weight in gold and more. That's worth entire galaxies. It lets her breathe easy.)

(Someone could take out her knee and they wouldn't make her fight because it wouldn't be entertaining, sure. But she doesn't know what comes _after_.)

It's a fight to the death, and she's not dying.

She breathes an apology to her family, her team, and starts crossing lines they'd drawn in the sand a long, long time ago.

Zarkon watches her first fight.

When she enters, he makes eye contact.

When she gets knocked down, he smiles.

When she wrestles a knife from her opponent and finishes them off with their own weapon, and keeps going even after they're down _just in case_ (because she _needs to keep going_ and she's _terrified_ ), he laughs, loud, echoing, just audible enough above all the clamor of the stadium, scraping down the walls of her mind like she handed him the blade she's just claimed and he's gouging track marks in her head with it.

She looks at the body in the sand, looks at the knife, looks at him. Her eyes burn.

She refuses to let any tears fall, and instead promises that one day, she will kill him.

And if she dies in the process, then so be it.

* * *

It's like he _knows_ what she's thinking.

Then again, she supposes, it's never been confirmed for them in this new reality of theirs if mind-reading or telepathy is real or not.

(She has to believe that if it is, the Galra don't have it at all.

She _has_ to believe that.

If she doesn't, she might go crazy. She might walk into the arena one day and let her opponent put a bullet or a blade or fist right through her fucking skull.

She has to believe that, or she might've just doomed her entire team, her entire family, her entire planet, with that stupid, _stupid_ move she'd made.

 _Sacrifice_.

It's not all it's cracked up to be.)

“They won’t find a Paladin there.”

“The hell is _that_ supposed to mean?” Pidge spits. She's getting real fucking tired of his visits to her cell, his lip service, his mind games—everything, really.

She'd never voiced her thoughts on the possibility of the Paladins returning to Earth, trying to find a replacement for her there instead of shuffling around their pre-existing roster, but it seems she doesn't need to with him.

Purple skin tightens as a slow grin curls at a lipless mouth.

“I think you’ll find,” Zarkon says like he’s drawing it out, savoring it—like they’re watching the unraveling of the greatest joke the universe has ever told, and he’s the only one who knows the punchline, “that the Black Lion has always had a taste for Paladins... with one foot in the battledome.”

Pidge swallows, a lump in her throat. Her barely-there nails bite crescents into her palms and she tastes blood and fury above all else.

 _Well_ , she thinks, with a vicious sort of vigor, _doesn’t that just make too much damn sense_.

(It doesn’t occur to her until later that it had been the Green Lion they were talking about, not the Black.)

* * *

On the eighth month (Ninth? Tenth? Eighth, it has to be the eighth, she can't possibly have lost that much time already—) she meets an engineer.

"Paladin," he blinks at her through the glowing energy field between them that makes up the fourth wall of her cell, then follows it up with, "Human."

"Astute observation," she responds dryly, not really sure why she's answering him.

He's a little less furry than most of the other Galrans—mostly bald, actually.

"What are you doing down here?" The question comes out of her mouth just on the wrong side of sarcastic, not actually expecting a response and not exactly wanting one, either.

She asks anyway, though, because what is arguably the worst part of imprisonment (or at least _feels_ like the worst part when she's stuck in the middle of it, though she notes that her mind is quick to change as soon as anything actually happens) is the sheer, mind-numbing _boredom_.

The only numbers she has to keep her occupied are the ones she makes up and the tallies on her wall.

She's already run through practically all the equations she could come up with that she can run through without having a visual aid to keep track of things, because she can't exactly write any of them out.

She's also mentally played out as much of the Star Trek franchise in her head as she can remember accurately enough to do so, what must have been six times over by now, figured out how to fix a block of code her and Hunk had been stuck on for weeks, started practicing her Italian and Spanish again, got annoyed because she couldn't remember the word for _nine_ in Italian when she was practicing counting and there was nothing she could do to fill in the gap because it's not like there's a bilingual _dictionary_ for Earth languages up here, got frustrated because she started mixing up cognates in the two because it's been almost a year since she's practiced either and she wasn't exactly fluent to begin with, and then gave up on that pretty much entirely and moved on to attempting to mimic different accents in Common they'd heard since coming to space and listing all the countries on Earth alphabetically, among several other stupid things.

Exercising and trying to get into better shape for the arena only passes the time for so long, and it barely even does _that_ because it gets her into her head more than anything else.

She'd honestly rather be sitting through exams at the Garrison right now than stuck in here, because at least that would be something to _do_ and give her something actually marginally productive to think about; at least it'd have a _payoff_ at the end.

So, yes. She's always looking for things to pass the time, and someone passing by? Considering the distinct lack of any other life anywhere near her cell barring Zarkon and the occasional group of guards to drag her out to the arena or the infirmary or something, that's interesting enough to make do with, even if she'll just be left to wonder instead of actually getting a real answer.

It's quite a surprise, then, when she _does_.

"I am looking for something. Why do you want to know?"

_Maybe because you stopped right in front of my cell and then directly addressed me, wise guy._

She rolls her eyes.

"No one ever comes down here."

It's something that admittedly took her a bit to notice, caught up in everything that was going on and digesting her situation, but it's true—she's the only one down here.

She's not with the other prisoners; they split off on their way to and from the arena, turning different directions three-quarters of the way there (she's even started counting paces and calculating the fractions and percentages of their route).

She's not in a high traffic area, either—quite the opposite, actually. Usually, no engineers, sentries, or foot-soldiers pass through at all, with the exception of a check on her cell mechanisms every forty days that happens while she's fighting, and her escorts to and from those fights—and none of them are particularly talkative, but walking with them is at least preferred to the roar of the arena or the deafening silence of her own mind.

She has a hunch that it's pretty hard to just wind up here because you get lost.

This is completely deliberate. They've isolated her intentionally, and Pidge has thought about it a lot by now—it's both punishment and preventative measure.

This way, she has no contact other than what they want her to have. She finds no relief in other prisoners and is forced instead to either stew to the point of madness or find relief in Zarkon's visits, of all things, which she _refuses_ to do.

She also gets no information from them—on the ship or the guards or the war or other languages or what different parts of the universe are like. This by itself accomplishes many things, but the primary one is that it makes it far more difficult for her to find a way to escape.

Meanwhile, the other prisoners don't get any intel from her, either—likely so they don't go getting smart ideas, like trying to escape, or bribing the guards for more privileges, or staging a revolt. They don't know the state of their families or their planets or any active resistance groups that Pidge might have encountered in her relatively brief time traversing the galaxies. Their information and dependency is funneled through the Galra alone at the moment.

They have complete control of the narrative.

The Galran's ears—long, narrow, closer to where human ears are than those most Galrans have—flicker, and she's not sure how to interpret that reaction.

He blinks again, that solid, glowing yellow unchanging.

"Exactly," is his response, and his voice is neutral, but oddly pointed. " _No one ever comes down here_."

And that—

Her eyes go wide, and all of a sudden she's tearing her gaze away from the dark ceiling, shooting upright.

She swings her legs over the side of the cot, perching carefully on the edge, hands at her sides and feet already starting to push off, ready to stand at a moment's notice. Her eyes don't leave the engineer now, and though his face doesn't change, he gives off a sort of pleased air at having managed to grab her attention.

Her gaze flickers to the corners of the room, though she knows there's nothing there—there have been too many reports on the Paladins even in their short time operating for Zarkon not to believe that she could find a way to get to any camera or microphone she could see, rip it out of the wall with her bare hands if she had to, and hack or dismantle it to do just about anything she wanted. (It's not exactly an unfounded belief, either.)

No cameras and no microphones was a smart move in that regard, but it's not without its obvious drawbacks.

"Who are you?" Her eyes narrow, taking in the stranger.

The uniform he's wearing fits well and doesn't look bloodied, dirtied, or torn. Probably not stolen, then, unless he somehow managed to get into the room they hold them itself, which seems like a slightly unnecessary detour in whatever he's doing, regardless of what that is.

So... an actual Galran engineer?

Here to... what? Collaborate with her? Set her free? Kill her?

He tilts his head to the side. "Do you know the one they call the Champion?"

Her lips thin, and he nods at her silence, as if that was all the answer he needed.

"I helped him escape."

... _What_.

But that means—

Her heart all but stops, and she sucks in a shaky breath.

"Do you know—"

"I do not know anything about the other humans he was captured with. I never had any contact with them. Their group was split long before I ever met Shiro."

Her whole body almost sags in defeat at the words, but she refrains.

She hadn't found anything when she'd been with Voltron, and she hadn't found anything in the past however-many months she'd been with the Galra from the brief and rare snippets of conversation she could sneak with the other prisoners while they were waiting to go into the ring, but that doesn't mean that there's _nothing there_ to find.

It just means that she needs to look _harder_.

There are some mysteries, some missing people, that simply never get solved or found, even after decades; and that's just on _Earth_.

With a whole universe they could be lost in, she has a whole universe of leads to turn over.

Every person who doesn't know anything isn't another dead-end, it's another path to cross off in the effort to narrow down the search.

(She very determinedly does not think about how many with a longer life expectancy than the average human have spent their entire lives exploring the universe and still never see more than a bare fraction of it, does not think about how many people have died searching the galaxies for something they might never find.

If she dares give it any more thought, she's not sure what'll happen.)

"So you're... a traitor? A defector? What?"

His head tilts again, and he stares at her for a long moment in which she has to resist the urge to shift uncomfortably under the weight of those eerie eyes.

Finally, he says, "I am on your side."

She's starting to get the impression that this lack of answers is going to be a running theme here.

Before she can get another word out of her mouth, he cuts her off.

"My name is Ulaz."

* * *

There's blood flying all around her, on her face, her hands, grains of sand stuck in liquid life gone tacky, caught in the tangles of her hair, adrenaline pumping through her veins, and Pidge very nearly _revels_ in it.

That's the worst part of this, she thinks. The arena is easy to become addicted to. Almost as easy as it is to loathe it with her whole soul.

It's been a long time, too long.

Long enough for her to know that no one is coming for her.

(She wonders if Matt and Sam feel this way.

She wonders if the team's found them yet.

And wouldn't that be ironic? They aren't found until she's taken.

An eye for an eye, a Holt for a Holt.

If that's the trade that needed to happen, she can't bring herself to regret it.)

She doesn't know in terms of _units_ , exactly how long. Time is hard to measure in space, harder in imprisonment.

She wakes up every day and the first thing she does is make a neat, small mark on the wall of her cell, meticulous as ever in the only effort she can give to keep some semblance of order here.

There are hundreds of those marks, now. Thousands.

They stretch from the top left corner and all the way across, making their way downward in inches and feet, and she stares at them for days like they'll give her the answers to everything.

But hours pass like molasses and there are gaps that can't be accounted for.

Her numbers are off now, but she's not sure by how much, if she's missing days or weeks or even months.

She sometimes wants to stop counting, wants to just take a single day where as soon as she opens her eyes she's not standing on her cot and painfully etching another tally into the wall with her fingernails, holding out for the moment she either breaks free or runs out of space to mark or _dies_ ; wants to stop waiting for something that will never happen, stop torturing herself with the knowledge of how long she's been in this hell, how long she's been away from her team, her friends, her family, but she can't bring herself to do it.

This is one of the few things in this place that lets her keep some semblance of control over her situation, and if she loses that she's not sure what she'll end up doing.

She'd rather make mark after mark until her nails are gone and her fingers are raw and bloody than lose track of the passage of time.

She'd rather die because she can't hold her knife right any more than be unable to say when today bleeds into tomorrow into always into _not getting out of here, not ever_.

She turns the blade over in her hand and thinks about how _easy_ it would be.

Just a slip of her grip—

Or letting her guard down for one second—

Or—

A terribly tired smile crosses her face and from the way her gasping opponent takes just a half-step back with wide eyes, she can’t help but wonder if all the ghosts hiding behind it make themselves visible when it does.

Her fingers curl tighter around her weapon, and she thinks that maybe she’ll end up getting her wish—

She lunges.

Her opponent doesn’t quite dodge quick enough.

—Or maybe not.

* * *

"Hey, Zarkon."

He sighs like acknowledging her is some great chore, despite the fact that he's the one who keeps coming down to her cell in the first place; came and kept coming from that first night until tonight, all this time later.

"Yes, Paladin?"

"I'm going to get out of here."

He gives her a sort of indulgent smile, and she's not sure if it's because he truly thinks the notion of such a thing is impossible and her insistence on it amusing, or if it's just because she sees a need to remind him so frequently at such random times.

She doesn't like that expression directed at her regardless of the answer.

"I'm sure you will, Paladin."

She wonders absently if he's ever going to bother trying to learn her name at all. Probably not.

"And when I do?" She glances over at him, lazy smile morphing into a sharp snarl, "I'm going to _obliterate_ you."

It's not an empty threat.

He's seen her fight.

He knows what she's capable of. What he's pushed her to.

And he's never going to stop pushing, because it's interesting to watch for him.

No, it's not an empty threat.

He knows that.

They both do.

His small smile grows like she's just issued the greatest challenge, the most wonderful game, and he can't wait to see how it plays out.

"I look forward to seeing you try."

* * *

"Your guards are very chatty," Pidge intones dryly.

The corner of Zarkon's mouth turns up.

"Ah, yes. I'm sure you're coming to realize things of some importance that you've previously overlooked."

"Such as?" She's not dumb, it's pretty obvious where he's going with this. Nonetheless, the question falls from her lips, searching as always for any extra clue or scrap of information he might unknowingly drop.

The other side of his mouth twitches a little, something that's almost a dully amused smile creeping in.

"Common won't get you far. Not here, and not anywhere else."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

She's sure that she can get on as well traversing the whole universe with only Common to communicate about as successfully as traveling across the Earth and using only English—that is to say, not very well at all.

But one can never be sure of where the thought processes of others are going.

Humans— _people_ in general, because she’s coming to learn that it’s something of a universal trait—are unpredictable like that. There's so much more room for error that just isn't there with tech—steps you can't take back, ideas you can't see, numbers you can't track. (There's a reason she's always preferred the tech.)

"Don't you see, Paladin? It means that I'm teaching you a _valuable lesson_ , so I hope that you're _paying attention_. I'm _helping_ you. You must learn, or you will never survive."

Pidge doesn't believe a single word out of his mouth.

"Learn _what_?"

The skin around his mouth pulls back, the slight smile that was there morphing into something else, just this side of feral, until he's baring his teeth in a snarl, the turnaround almost abrupt.

" _Adapt_."

* * *

Zarkon's right about one thing—only knowing Common isn't going to get her very far in a universe-wide war against the Galran Empire.

So she goes with the obvious answer.

About once a movement, Ulaz sneaks down to her cell. He helps her throw around ideas for a jail-break, passes on information on the rest of the ship, the Galrans, the history of the war, the latest reports on her team and the most recent going-ons of the war. Sometimes, when he just sits and keeps her company for a few minutes (which is an incredibly stupid risk that she appreciates quite a bit) he’s started bringing books and tablets and will begin teaching her the basics of the Galran language.

Know thy enemy, and all that.

In light of the Galran lessons she’s all but given up on Italian—the fewer languages she’s focused on at a time the easier it is to learn them, and one far outweighs the other in this situation—but still returns to Spanish every once in a while, if for no other reason than that she’s pretty sure a couple of the other Paladins speak it in some capacity and would enjoy the practice, and she doesn’t want to have to retake however many years of foreign language classes if she ever returns to Earth and feels like getting a GED, or something. (It’s a nice thought that she’ll ever actually have to worry about any of these things.)

But, as interesting and useful as Spanish would be to learn under normal circumstances, here, Galran has to take precedence.

She practices as much as she can, in her downtime.

When she's counting her tallies, she'll run through the numbers, muttering them under her breath in Galran. When she's at the arena or in transport to or from there, she strains to hear the conversations around her, seeing how much of them she can understand, and attempts to read any signs they pass. When Ulaz teaches her a new set of words, she'll repeat them over and over again to herself until they're ingrained in her memory or everything that rolls off her tongue starts to sound like gibberish.

The grammar structure is incredibly strange and hard to get used to, but easy enough to understand in theory.

She's started verbalizing all her stray thoughts in an effort to improve on the actual speaking portion, but it's slow going with such a limited vocabulary for now and only a surface-level knowledge of the grammar and minutiae details of the language.

During the day, she fights, exercises in her cell, counts her tallies, does her equations, practices her vocabulary, and splits her time talking to Ulaz, talking to Zarkon, and talking to herself.

At night, she falls into a fitful sleep and dreams of her blood and death and stars and returning to her friends and family.

Slowly, she realizes that when she's absentmindedly thinking up would-be, half-baked, never-actually-going-to-be-enacted escape plans, she's started to include Ulaz in them, too.

* * *

"What is your name, Paladin?" Ulaz asks, and it's somewhat surprising when she realizes that she actually hasn't told him yet.

Maybe she kind of assumed he wouldn't care (Zarkon certainly didn't). Maybe she figured he just already knew.

Really, she's pretty sure it just slipped her mind entirely.

She hasn’t heard another person say either of her given names since she was captured.

Still—she'd already begun learning Galran from him, gathering information from him, thinking of him as something of a friend, including ways to safely extract him from his undercover position in her fantasies of escaping, and—he doesn't even know her name yet.

She hesitates, licking her lips.

Instead of _Pidge_ , what she says is—"Katie. My name's Katie."

"Kay-teee," Ulaz rolls out the word, and his voice comes out a buzz of clicks and whirs, wrapping around her name in a way that's not quite _wrong_ , but not exactly _right_ , either.

(Strange though it sounds coming from the alien's mouth, it's a relief to hear her old name again.

It's been—

Months? Probably. Years?

... Maybe.)

(When did she last see Shiro again?)

"Kay-teee."

"Yeah," she smiles weakly, and can't help it when her voice comes out all weak and wobbly or her eyes start to water. (Because whatever the case, it's been far too long.) "Katie."

* * *

Pidge sits in her cell and stares at the wall.

Hundreds and hundreds of lavender tallies decorate the deep purple, lined neatly in groups of ten, running in straight lines across the wall, over and over and over again.

It's a hauntingly beautiful image.

A fitting one, too, for the occasion.

Today, she made her two-thousandth mark on that wall.

Two thousand, divided by three hundred and sixty-five, accounting for the two leap years ( _Shiro's birthday_ , she wonders if they still celebrate things like that) that would've passed, so two thousand, minus seven hundred thirty-two. That'd be one thousand, two hundred sixty-eight, divided by three hundred sixty-five, plus the leap years.

Approximately 5.4739726.

That's nearly five and a half years where she hasn't seen the outside of this station she's being kept in.

Nearly six since she's set foot on Earth.

Nearly six and a half since she's seen her mother.

Nearly seven since Matt and Sam were taken.

Seven years since Kerberos. Seven Castleship residents. Seven the magic number.

Because there's supposed to be some significance to that number, somehow.

But there's nothing particularly special about five and a half, is there?

Five and a half years of imprisonment.

And she's not planning on sticking around to see ten.

Her gaze runs over the wall of tallies again contemplatively.

She'd long ago accepted that no one else was going to be coming to get her.

Well, fine.

Seven it is, then.

* * *

"You got hit by your opponent's whip today."

Of _course_ he saw that.

"It caught me off—" Pidge purses her lips, searching for the word. Ulaz looks utterly unsympathetic. (She _did_ ask for him to let her learn.) "Off guard."

"Then perhaps your guards need to be more careful about their rotations."

She holds herself back from rolling her eyes.

Ulaz's analogies are always a stretch and never very well worded, in any language. Though, perhaps she isn’t exactly well-versed enough in Galran to be able to make that judgement—language is weird; some things are just untranslatable, and not easily understood at first; for all that the literal meaning may come across quite clearly or the figurative meaning might be explained, it just doesn’t quite click yet. Regardless, his comments somehow always manage to feel chastising and snarky at the same time, anyway.

"You try going through two tournament circuits in three days," She murmurs.

The markings on either side of Ulaz's head flex a little, a gesture she's come to equate as akin to one raising an eyebrow.

Which. Yeah, maybe that's fair.

You'd think after all this time she'd be a little more fluent, but she still has trouble remembering a lot of words and phrases.

"Anyway, that is not the point."

She grimaces—she’ll have to ask him to teach her contractions soon. It feels weird speaking out the whole thing when she knows there’s a quicker way to say it, even if it doesn’t even save her a full extra second.

... Actually, does Galran even _have_ contractions? She’ll have to ask.

"What _is_ the point?"

She lays it out for him as bluntly as possible.

"We have a year and a half to get me out of here."

There's no finishing part to that statement.

There's no ultimatum, no event that she needs to make.

She just knows that she's getting out of here before seven years have passed or she'll burn the whole station down with herself in it trying.

Ulaz is silent for a moment, blinking in quiet surprise, before saying calmly, "Well. I guess we'd better get planning, then."

* * *

Pidge was taken alone.

She is imprisoned alone.

And in the end, there is no rescue coming, so she escapes alone, too.

(Or, at least—almost alone.)

* * *

There's a rumbling in her mind and it's all she can do not to literally sob at the sheer relief and happiness that wash over her at the long-missed feeling.

But—

She stops before she can fall too far into the trap of emotions; steps back and examines it, turning the sensation over in her mind.

And it's... different.

It's—

Not Green.

* * *

"Guys. This is Ulaz. He's a friend."

"...Pidge _what the fuck_ —"

* * *

So Pidge finds out a few things after a long, _long_ talk with the team.

First of all, although they're now allied with a mostly Galran resistance group, that does not automatically make them trust Ulaz.

Second, Ulaz is a _part_ of that Galran resistance group? Proving that seems to be the tipping point to warm the team to him, though they're still a little wary.

Next is that Allura was indeed accepted as the Green Paladin. The team ran into all the problems she'd predicted, and probably a bunch more, but they'd managed to figure it out eventually.

They'd found Keith's mom (who is apparently _alive_ and also _Galran_ and _another_ member of that resistance group?), and she and Keith had become the liaisons between the Blades of Marmora and the Voltron team and their other allies, so she also has a semi-permanent place in the Castle, filling in Coran's old position during battles when necessary.

Speaking of Coran, he is, in fact, able to do all that Allura could with the Castle and more, apparently. His grandfather was one of the primary designers and engineers who originally built the Castle—an important fact that she admits she’d overlooked—and so Coran has an inherited connection to it through his grandfather’s line, just as Allura does through Alfor and his own ancestors’ line.

Hunk can change his Bayard between three different forms now, Lance can change his between two, Keith has apparently managed to actually bond with the team beyond what they’d managed to achieve in her time with them previously, Allura and Hunk have matching space tattoos now, they all have secondaries ready to take their place as Paladins if anything happens to them, and between the four of them, they’re missing a combined total of four toes, half an ear, two fingers and a kidney.

So. She'd missed a lot.

Seven years.

Who knew?

Oh, yeah.

And there's one more thing.

Shiro's dead.

* * *

Pidge isn't sure what she's supposed to do.

In a way, she'd been counting on Shiro's continued presence.

She'd figured that either she'd go back to being the Green Paladin and Allura would fulfill her previous position, or, more likely, everyone would stay in the same positions they'd had prior to her rescue, and Pidge would fill in for Coran's old spot.

But they've got that covered, haven't they?

Shiro was arguably her closest connection on the team. He was the most earnest in helping her search for her missing family, being the only other person who'd met them and thus the only one with any personal stake in finding them.

He'd also been the only one who had been imprisoned by the Galra.

She'd hoped she'd have someone to relate to.

Instead, she'd missed him by mere weeks.

Just her luck, right?

Just theirs, too, apparently.

They'd been trying to find a new Black Paladin ever since their leader had died, because Black wouldn't let any of them in.

But apparently, she's ready to welcome Pidge with open arms, like that makes any sort of sense.

Again: _just her luck._

She can't feel Green in her mind anymore—it's been too long and they'd barely had a chance to bond in the first place, but the Black Lion is an ever-there presence, constantly hovering in the back of her mind in a rumble or a purr or a roar.

She can't escape it.

(And she's certainly _tried_.)

It's like the Lion is making sure she won't run away from this, that she isn't able to leave the mantle of the Black Paladin behind. It's a reminder that _this is your fate now. You lead Voltron and you fight for them, and you're to keep leading and fighting for them until the war is over or you die trying to make it_ _so._

And it's _not fair_.

It isn't.

Doesn't she get some time to recover?

She's just been imprisoned for over half a decade; just seen her friends, her teammates, other people of her species, speakers of the same native language as her, for the first time in _years_.

She's still got injuries that never quite healed right, still got open wounds from the chaos of their escape, still needs time to adjust to the new schedule (the Castle's night and day shifts are hours off from what she's gotten used to, and now they have actual training sessions and meetings to attend at specific times), not to mention trying to down the food goo without it making a sudden reappearance (its texture is even worse than she remembers it being, but maybe that's just because she's spent the last few years eating almost exclusively Galran trade-marked protein packets), and a shitload of mental and emotional problems on top of all that.

It hasn't even been a month since Shiro died, and she's only just found out. At least the others had a couple of weeks to deal with it. 

Doesn't she get a chance to grieve?

(Then again, does it even matter, if she's already said goodbye to them all ages ago?)

The answer to both is hard to palate and simple to provide: no, she doesn't. She doesn't have that luxury.

Or, rather, she needs to get very creative in her multitasking and compartmentalization if she really wants to do either of those things.

There's a war going on, still.

Billions and billions of lives are on the line.

They can't afford to take a few weeks or months or however long for her to get her head on straight.

It's not fair.

But this isn't about what's fair.

It never has been.

* * *

The team has regular times scheduled specifically to bond with their Lions.

The first time she partakes, she walks to Black's hangar alone and stands at the closed doors for five whole minutes before she can muster the will to enter.

When she finally does, she sits cross-legged on the floor directly in front of the robotic beast, and for the first time since she stepped foot back on the Castleship, Black is finally, _finally_ silent.

Pidge utters only one thing in the entire two-hour block.

"I hate you."

The Black Lion has nothing to say to that.

* * *

Pidge the Green Paladin died at some point in the past seven years.

She clings on in remnants left within the skin of the girl who has been forged and re-forged and come out— _different_. A screwdriver, fashioned into a knife.

But she's not sure Pidge the Black Paladin is ready to be born yet, and she's not sure she's ready to let the Green Paladin go.

 _The Green Paladin will fly again_ , she recalls.

Green's great, and Pidge loves her, doesn't think she'll ever truly be able to grow apart from her, but Pidge is far from the girl who Green first took on, and they both recognize that. She's still _her_ , somehow, somewhere, but what fit then doesn't necessarily fit the same now.

Allura, though...

Allura's Green, through-and-through, just like she's Red and Blue and Yellow and even Black.

Yes, the Green Paladin will fly again. Or rather, the Green Paladin will _keep_ flying.

Pidge has to move on.

(She resolutely does not think about how Zarkon was _right_ , about two things now, and what that might mean for everything else he'd said.)

She's coming to terms with this.

That doesn't mean she has to like it.

* * *

Ulaz starts inviting Krolia and Keith to their Galran practice sessions, and occasionally their other teammates decide to invite themselves as well.

The humans all have a bit of an Altean accent mixed in with their accents from Earth now, because apparently Allura and Coran started teaching them all their mother tongue not long after she separated from the team, and the prolonged interaction with them has a bit of an adaption effect anyway.

Besides Keith, they're all at about the same place in their Galran, because their resident Blades have already started them on the language as well. The Red Paladin has a bit of a leg up on them due to his time with the Blades, which was essentially an immersion experience, and also apparently two (not-?) years stuck in a fold of space-time with his mom? (These things keep cropping up where she has _no idea_ what they're talking about, and it only makes the divide between them feel wider than ever.)

"You remind me of Tex," Krolia says one day after a practice-conversation where the group tripped through a conversation on family and catching each other up on the past few years while somehow managing to avoid the landmines riddling those subjects. Her voice and face are both infuriatingly blank, and Pidge doesn't know if that's supposed to be a compliment or not.

"What happened to Tex?" She finds herself asking.

The woman blinks, sharp gaze seeming to pierce layers of consciousness, straight through her soul, and says, "What _didn't_ happen to Tex?"

(Pidge never does find out.)

* * *

It all comes to a head—all things do, at some point, even if it takes ten thousand years for it to happen.

That doesn’t mean that’s the end of things—far from it; it’s the peak of a crescendo in a symphony of war, not the bang of cymbals that ends it all.

No, it’s not the end, but it is—

 _Significant_ is at once too heavy a word, and too light of one.

Despite the occasion, it starts out a relatively ordinary ordeal. The team has a plan, they get there, it all goes to hell, and that plan goes out the window almost immediately. The usual order of things, really.

And then, history comes back in an ironic twist of fate—Pidge separates from the group, from the familiar song and dance of improvisation they had fallen into all those years ago, and now again as they learned to work with a new leader; she goes alone, leaves her Lion behind and turns her comms off. 

Almost eight years, now—it’s not enough to stop the deja vu from reaching her. Last time she did something like this and went at it alone in the middle of a battle, it’d been much the same—yes, reckless, but also so incredibly deliberate, intentional, calculated as everything she does.

In a way, this is exactly how her journey started, and regardless of if she makes it out of this encounter alive or not, it’s going to end in exactly the same manner. She nearly laughs at the irony.

Last time, she hadn’t seen her team for years, but at least they’d survived the encounter.

This time, she’s going to cut the head off the snake even if it manages to rip out her throat in the throes of death, and one way or another, her team need only dispose of its body.

She almost laughs at the parallels and how both unpleasantly strong and distinctly lacking they are, but she refrains. She won’t give him that.

Zarkon has taken many things from her.

It’s time _she_ takes something from _him_.

* * *

"I did tell you I'd kill you."

Her face is a cold mask, her voice perfectly level.

She has nothing left that she is willing to give to this monster.

He smiles, and she hates it.

"You did, didn't you?" He chokes. He's far too smug and far too amused for someone bleeding out on the ground.

She doesn't pity him because there's nothing there to pity, doesn't take mercy on him because he never did with her.

She has written those emotions out of her soul.

"You didn't believe me."

"Oh, I did. It was only a matter of when, and how, and if you would manage it before someone else got one of us first. But I never doubted you. Do you want to know why?"

"Stop talking."

"Because I am the only person who will ever really believe in you. You can kill me now—"

" _Stop. Talking._ "

"—but you will live for the rest of your life with the knowledge that the only person who never doubted you, who truly believed that you would ever, _ever_ amount to anything, is the one person you _hated most_ in this universe. And you killed him. And you will _never_ find that again. You will spend the _rest of your life_ —"

She stabs him through the throat before he can finish, and watches with a dark satisfaction as he gurgles and chokes on his own blood for one minute, two, and then it's over.

Just like that.

Thousands and thousands of years of pain and suffering for so many people, and all it takes is Pidge, little Pidgie Gunderson, with ten minutes and a rebar, to put an end to all of it.

It's—

Maddening.

His death is supposed to be freeing. It's supposed to feel _good_.

It only makes her angrier.

* * *

She leaves the Garrison at fourteen, a bitter child with everything to prove and nothing to lose and only one goal left in life.

She returns nine years later, twenty-three and jaded; she's an adult now, and nobody cheers to see her again because she arrives with a war on her heels.

The man who began it is dead, she's made sure of that, but his legacy lives on and the cosmos pay the price in pounds of flesh and blood.

One can't help but think that there’s some sort of vindication in this, that this place sacrificed her brother and father and friend to this war, even if unknowingly, and it’s with the Kerberos crew's blood and wits and sheer force of will that the rest of them have protected this miserable hellhole of a planet ( _home_ , she thinks, and it is a tasteless word) for so long, and now they are bringing the final stages _back_ to them.

Never mind that they’ve had no part in this conflict until now, no knowledge of it; let them get a taste of their own medicine.

(And she's changed, she can acknowledge that.

Only a part of her will admit that maybe that’s not always a good thing, that maybe she's a little too sharp, a little too severe.

The rest of her knows that holding back gets people killed, and she's fighting to win.

She's _earned_ that sharpness, that severity, and maybe it seems like too much to them but she's learned the hard way that in a universe where you're always under fire, you can never have enough armor.

If they don’t like it, they can roll over and let the Galra stab them in the soft flesh of their unprotected planet. At the very least, as far behind as they are, it will be a quick death.)

They panic, and they despair.

"What have you brought us?" They ask.

( _War_ , she thinks. _Chaos. I've brought you horrible, horrible things, and none of you will thank me for it. I've brought you everything you thrust us into, everything we protected you from. We bought you nine years. It's time you pay your debts._ )

And she answers, "The truth."

* * *

" _Katie_ ," her mom breathes, and she says it like a song, like a prayer, like the most beautiful word to ever grace time. "Katie, it's—it's really you! I _knew_ you were still alive—I _told_ them—I never stopped looking—I _swear I never stopped looking_ —"

This— _this_ Pidge can understand.

This woman is _hurting_ , like so many have, like _she has_.

She's a mother, a wife, a sister, a daughter, and right now she only has two of those things, desperately looking for the only family she has left.

Pidge knows that—knows sister, knows daughter, knows _desperate_ because it's been tattooed into her heart in a staccato beat over years and years.

And the thing is that Pidge is supposed to be able to help.

It's simple math, an easy concept.

She's comforted countless people over the years— the injured, the dying, the hysterical, screaming for those closest to them, hours and weeks and months and decades searching for their lost hearts with no results. She knows how to comfort these people because she _is_ these people; has been for as long as she can remember, has never quite left.

And by all accounts, this is the one person Pidge should be able to help _most_.

This is her _mother_.

Here, _she's_ one of the missing pieces.

All she has to do is fit back into place.

The problem is that she _can't_.

She can't because as much as she _is_ , she also _isn't_.

The brash teenager with something bitter and desperate to prove deep inside of her is _dead_.

That person is so far gone she wouldn't know her if she was looking her in the eye.

She's still brash, still bitter, still desperate to prove something she doesn't quite know, but it's _different_. It's _not the same_ and it _never will be_.

She's got nine years of the real fucking world and everything beyond it behind her now, and that's nine years that teenager can't buy back, nine years the soldier who's taken her place isn't sure she _wants_ to.

Pidge doesn't want to tell her mom the truth—doesn't want to tell her that the teenager she had to let go is still out there in space somewhere; that that teenager is never coming back.

She doesn't want to tell her that the war is over now, that she's searched every damn inch of the universe, every galaxy, every fold in space-time that she could possibly reach, and there's still no sign of those _other_ missing pieces—that Matt and Sam haven't been found yet, that they might never be, that there's a possibility they're not even out there _to_ find anymore.

Colleen Holt is someone who Pidge might've claimed to know like the back of her hand a few years back, and the Black Paladin knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that this will not break her, but it _will_ erase all-too vital parts of her.

Pidge is scared that all she's brought the woman is false hope, and doesn't know how to tell her that that's what it's going to end up being.

"Colleen," She nods.

Her mother looks like she's been slapped.

Right.

She's not supposed to refer to her parents by name here, because she doesn't have to worry about forgetting what they are if she doesn't anymore.

Colleen swallows, and gives a hesitant little smile.

"Katie?"

Pidge purses her lips.

As wonderful as it is to hear her real name said correctly and in her mother's voice, she can't be Katie here. It's one thing for Ulaz to say it, because that was a lifeline she gave him and could never bring herself to take back, but she _can't be Katie here_.

It's a fact she came to terms with very early on in her journey with Voltron and the Galra as a whole.

Katie won't survive any of this, and she _needs_ Katie to survive.

So just for now, just until this is all over, Pidge needs to take over for a little while.

"Call me Pidge."

Colleen looks devastated at the implications that statement carries.

She probably should be, and she probably doesn't know just how much.

Pidge isn't about to be the one to tell her.

* * *

The first meeting between the representatives of the Coalition of Voltron and the representatives of the UN council starts something a little like this:

"In order for an alliance to be possible, we have a list of conditions in the way your organization operates that we require to be met. Once you've proven that you're able to—"

"No. You don't dictate how this goes. You have no say in how the Paladins or the Coalition operate. We are an intergalactic organization responsible for the safety of the entire universe. No matter how many of our Paladins hail from your world, you are but a single planet on the fringes of the cosmos, and you have no power over us."

Compromise, not concede.

Bend, not break.

There is a very fine line that the Paladins are walking, but it is stronger than layers of graphene covered in a particle barrier and the UN will learn where it lays quicksmart or these negotiations will be over shortly.

(Pidge's words are controversial at best and inflammatory at worst, maybe even enough to end these negotiations before they've even started, but they're an important line in the sand that needed to be drawn.

The Black Lion purrs, quiet and proud in the back of her head.)

(The next day, Colleen tells her that she's trending, on everything.

Pidge isn't sure how to feel about that.

She doesn't use any of the house devices to find out.) 

* * *

The old Garrison staff who are connected with the negotiations seem to think they have some sort of right to her decisions, some sort of power over her, trying to play on relationships and loyalties that never really existed to sway her one way or another.

That's alright—she shuts them down quick.

"I don't even recognize you—"

"You recognize everyone you meet after missing a significant number of their formative years while they went through numerous traumatic events?"

They never have anything to say to that.

* * *

Pidge has good days, and she has bad ones, and in-between ones.

They all do.

On the good days, her body wakes her up around five am EST Earth time, and she feels human enough that she can roll out of bed and start whatever her day is supposed to be without spending upwards of an hour staring at the ceiling as the natural light slowly brightens the room, with only the deafening silence and buzzing, meaningless thoughts for company.

This isn’t _entirely_ new, in the sense that she’d fallen into something of a similar routine at the Garrison, having always wasted the night away finishing work that she should’ve started days ago, taking readings from the rooftop, or working on some personal project until she fell asleep without meaning to, and needing the extra time in the morning to get her side of her dorm cleaned up so her and her roommate didn’t get chewed out at morning call.

It’s a rare quiet time that she’s always made herself learn to appreciate in one way or another.

It’s been slow-going relearning that appreciation after the deep-seated resentment for silence that’s grown over the years, but she thinks that eventually that might be able to change. For now, she just doesn’t take for granted her ability to actually take up some sort of task or find some sort of noise to fill the house whenever she wishes.

Maybe they’re not exactly _good_ like how most people expect, but few things are these days. (It’s also on the good days that she finds herself hopeful that that number of things will be able to increase with time.) She’s content, though, and that’s good _enough_ for her.

On bad days, though, she wakes up screaming for the arena and shaking off sand that isn't there. She spends the whole day in a haze, and anyone touching her at all makes her feel ten different levels of sick for no apparent reason, like she's about to crawl out of her skin.

Pidge hates the bad days.

* * *

Sometimes Pidge kind of loathes the fact that they're back on Earth again.

People don't understand them here.

They look at them strangely and talk to them like they're some sort of alien, because most people sort of think that they are, even though they all know well and good by now exactly how human exactly how many members of their team are.

At this point, so many of them view the team as kind of just synonymous with _space_ that there really isn’t a difference in their eyes—they know they’re human, yes, but that’s only in theory. That knowledge never seems to do much in practice.

More than that, though, there’s always something happening, some noise being made, and after all these years of complete, absolute silence whenever there's a moment's quiet in the depths of space, it feels deafening.

They're wary of her here, too.

They don't know how to act around her.

And—a small, bitter part of her thinks _good_. They shouldn't.

This planet is her home. Everything she was born from originates here in some way or another.

But here? These people?

These are the people who left her father and her brother to die.

These are the people who covered up everything and pinned the blame on an innocent person, someone she'd grown to think of as an older brother, and who will never have a chance to defend his name himself.

These are the people who dared to show up to their funerals, and who the remainder of their family _let_ do so, because like it or not, Sam and Matt actually worked with these people; were _friends_ with these people. (This is how the Garrison treats their friends.)

These are the people who are, in nearly every way she can count, who she blames for getting her involved in Voltron's war in the first place, for turning her into what she is now.

She's the Black Paladin who _killed Zarkon_ , and she doesn't forgive easy; doesn't forget easy, either.

She almost wishes she _hadn't_ killed Zarkon, almost wishes the war was still at its peak of chaos instead of close to the ending stages.

Because some small, dark part of her says that these people deserve for the war they thrust on her and her friends, the war they protected them from with their lives, to be brought to them.

It would be—

Serendipitous.

( _Almost_.)

But.

These people are her friends now. _Their_ friends.

Or, they're supposed to be.

Not really friends, but—

Allies.

Yeah, allies.

Like it or not, she has to trust them, tolerate them, be civil with them.

To a degree.

(She’s seen where being friends with the Garrison gets you.

That’s not a fate she’s ever going to be willing to damn her team to unless she has no other choice.)

They seem to be struggling nearly as much as she is with this.

But for them, it's—different.

They don't have all this history—not that most of them know or remember.

It's almost like, instead of past experience dictating the strange way they're acting, they're... scared.

They eye her warily when she passes in the halls. They whisper behind her back when they think she can't hear, eyes wide and voices low. They're hesitant to approach her, and every word from her mouth or gesture of her hand seems to set them on edge.

Truth be told, she kind of appreciates it, because it means she can keep her interaction with them to a relative minimum, but she also has no idea what she's done for them to act this way.

Or what they've heard.

("Did you hear—"

"—Black Paladin—"

"—leader, right?"

"—used to be a student here?"

"Matt and Sam Holt's Katie—"

"—say she knows what happened to Shiro—"

"—killed Zarkon—"

"Yeah, I heard about that—"

"—absolutely brutal—"

"—won't release the records—")

(No, she doesn't know what they might’ve heard to make them act that way.

There are too many tales flying around for her to take a guess.)

* * *

Colleen is trying.

She’s trying so, so hard, and Pidge isn’t so far out of reach that she won’t acknowledge that.

She knows that at some point, she has to take a step forward of her own.

That knowledge brings with it fear in a way she’d thought she’d learned to manage, with the team, and before that she isn’t sure she’d ever really known.

Because why should she?

Why on earth would she ever want to try getting any closer and risk ruining one of the most important relationships in her life when she can just let it die a quiet death, an honorable one?

But it has been so very long since she’s seen a member of her family. She _wants_ and she _aches_.

She has turned missing them into a facet of her very being, and Pidge doesn’t think she can live with herself if she doesn’t take a _chance_. Ironic as it may be—she didn’t live this long by playing it _safe_.

It doesn’t need to be anything big, so she picks her opening carefully. It’s not much, even if Colleen accepts, but it’s at least an attempt to meet her halfway, and that speaks loudly enough by itself.

"... Want to play euchre with us?" She asks, and prays that the tiny, tentative feeling in her chest that's a little too close to hope for her taste isn't about to get crushed.

A slow, small smile spreads over Colleen's face, and Pidge politely doesn't acknowledge the wet shine in her eyes.

"Yes," Colleen— _Mom_ , she's supposed to be calling her _Mom_. She keeps forgetting—whispers. "Yes, I'd like that very much, thank you."

It's... something, Pidge decides as they settle at a table with the rest of the team, Coran trying to figure out how to bridge the cards.

Yeah, it's something.

They still have a long way to go.

That's okay, though. They have all the time in the world.

(Pidge almost wishes they didn't.)

( _Almost_ is such a big word these days, isn't it?)

* * *

She’s found herself going to Black more often lately when she can’t sleep or needs to get away.

It can’t ever hurt to deepen their bond, anyway, can it?

They’ve mostly gotten past Pidge’s icy hatred toward the Lion, but they still aren’t exactly buddy-buddy like some of the others.

Black is affectionate, yes, and she reaches out, but she’s not pushy about it; her presence insistent, but nothing else.

But…

Well, they’re growing on each other.

There’s a little mental nudge, and Pidge rolls her eyes, moving to grab a fluffy blanket from near the door of the hangar that she put there for exactly this reason.

“Yeah, yeah, you big lug,” she murmurs as she sits down again, wrapping her pajama-clad body in another layer of warmth.

Black knows when not to push, yes, but she’s also quite a mother hen. No wonder her and Shiro got along so well.

She sighs, pulling out her laptop and curling up against one of Black’s large paws, settling in to get to work for the night.

“I guess you’re not so bad,” she can’t help the small smile that comes with the soft words.

She’s sure she isn’t imagining the contented rumble that elicits.

* * *

It’s not enough.

They’ve all come so far, and it’s _progress_ , progress on so many levels.

It _should_ be enough—or, she thinks it should, at least—but it isn’t, and for all she tries, there’s no telling _why_. It’s something beyond anything else that might come to mind, like Sam or Matt, or dealing with the trauma and not-so-slow but steady onset of reverse culture shock, or the headache that is navigating intergalactic politics in wake of a several thousand-year-long war that they’re still not exactly through yet.

There’s just—something else missing, some hollow void somewhere, a persistent itch just beneath her skin, a thought she can’t quite catch.

So she does what one is wont to do: try to fill whatever gap it is that’s quietly settled into her life. Pidge writes.

She writes and writes and writes and it's a kind of solace she didn't think she'd ever be able to find again, because she'd gone so long without hacking or coding or the hum of machinery or the clacking of a keyboard, and she feels like she should be able to do more with them now than she is, because it's been a while, and she's forgotten so many things, but she's working on it, she's getting better, she really is, she swears she's getting better, she can do better, she can be useful, _she'll be better_ —

It's a damn _relief_ , is what it is.

She wakes up with her heart pounding at odd hours of the night and gets lost in the blue light of the screens or the ink staining her hands.

She retires from lunch early and writes more. She can eat later, she wasn't that hungry anyway.

She scribbles spare numbers and bits of code on the edges of notes, spare napkins, the back of her hands, her arms, occasionally the others' faces if they're unfortunate enough to fall asleep when she gets struck by inspiration.

The lines all but write themselves. They rattle in her mind and shake in her lungs and seize her heart in a fist and _squeeze_ until she makes them real, brings them to life, writes them out or types them up or does _something_ to give them substance.

She writes until she _finishes_.

And it's not much, it never is, but it's _something_.

She analyzes information, combs through databases, all the information they've ever gotten on the Galra and the nuisances currently leading the show. She compares and tracks movements of enemies, allies, neutral parties, anyone and everyone, scans prison databases and grave records and runs facial recognition programs over any and every piece of video they get, because they've got a war to win, and because Matt and Sam are still out there somewhere and dead or alive she's going to _find_ _them_ if it's the _last thing she does_.

"Ready?" She asks, and the hand on her shoulder tightens, her mother at her back and their whole team behind her.

"All systems are prepared for the upload," Coran confirms quietly, eyes flickering between his tablet and the holo-screen in front of her.

Pidge takes a deep breath, stomach fluttering with nerves, and begins the integration.

It feels like it takes forever, but they stay the whole time, watching the progress in silence.

After hours, finally, the lights dim, then flicker back to their usual brightness, and the program jumps to life.

"Hey there," Pidge whispers reverently, fingers hovering over the hologram, almost reaching out to touch but stopping herself short, half worried doing anything to disturb the program will make it all fall to pieces.

The screen pulses in acknowledgment of her words, a little chirp sounding.

"Welcome to the team... S.H.I.R.O."

She leans back in her chair, watching the AI run intently.

"We'll find them, Pidge," Keith promises.

She wants to ask if he hasn't learned his lesson about making promises you can't keep in the hellscape the last nine years (or eleven, in his case) of their lives have been, but she can't bring herself to suggest the alternative out loud, can't bring herself to object to the hope that the one thing she's followed through with a single-minded sort of intensity over the past near-decade is finally _happening_... so she says nothing. For once, she sits back and lets herself take the reassurance, lets her team take care of her in their own way.

"We have to."

* * *

The Spatial Honing and Information Roaming Operations system does its job well—maybe even too well.

None of them can bring themselves to be surprised because it’s Pidge who made it in a slew of sleepless nights and restless days stacked up over time, and she’s never really been one to launch projects half-finished.

(And no, she’s not going to give in to all the needling and admit that an entirety of one of those nights was spent trying to find a name to fit the acronym she’d prematurely settled on before finally ending on that stretch of a title, so Lance can very well stop trying to get her to.)

Soon, they’re matching missing people and prisoners and graves and bodies and refugees and migrants—and it’s like all that time of empathizing with these people who’ve been separated is finally being realized, grief and closure and gratitude and relief coming in droves.

They still have a long way to go, but this is a rather significant part of cleaning up the mess Zarkon left behind, and the sooner it gets started, the better.

And then comes the day.

Because Pidge knows what she’s doing when it comes to coding, pretty much always has, and S.H.I.R.O. was a good way to dust off her skills—not to mention they’re uncovering fringe and resistance groups they hadn’t yet connected with, more and more surfacing by the day, many (though not all) of them seeking to join them, or at least trade information.

And _that_ means assimilating data systems so everyone is on the same page and has the most up to date information, making sure all the blind spots are covered.

It also gives their new resident AI more to work with, especially when those resistance groups happen to be willing to give information on their active members.

Matt never was very good at sitting things out when he could be doing something to help.

It’s a good day—a _great_ one, where she’s not just content, but honest-to-god _jubilant_ , damn near _euphoric_.

A full _decade_ of misery since Kerberos and _finally_ there’s _some sort of payoff_.

The war's not over yet, and Sam— _Dad's_ —still out there somewhere, but—

But for now, they have this.

For now, their family's a little more broken, and a little more whole, and they have one more pair of hands on deck to search and one less person that they're looking for.

For now, for the first time in years, they can each take a moment to themselves, to relax, and appreciate what they've accomplished, and just _be_.

For now, she can just hug her mom and brother, and let herself be hugged back.

"You did good, Pidge."

And for once? She actually believes it.

**Author's Note:**

> [ **ID 1:** The cover image. A digitally drawn picture, with a close-up of Pidge from the second image (see ID 2 for description of full painting), cropped to show a section of the painting spanning the original width, but only a small amount of the length. Pidge is oriented right-center in the painting and shown from her chest up in dark purple clothes. She looks disheveled, and has a feral expression on her face, with furrowed eyebrows and bared teeth. Her hair is pulled into a side ponytail on her right, and her right arm can be seen rising behind her on the left side of the painting. She stands in a dimly lit room with a crowd in the background. In the upper right corner are the words "One Foot in the Battledome" written in a clean, white font. In smaller text of the same font and color, the words "by Ink_Beneath_Her_Fingernails" are written directly below the title. In the bottom right corner, it is signed "Loz" in white.]
> 
> [ **ID 2:** A digitally drawn picture of Pidge. She stands in the foreground, shown from the knees-up, and is coming toward the viewer from the right side of the painting, ready to lunge. She is dressed in a Galran prison uniform, with a dark purple undersuit and a ragged crop-top in a slightly lighter shade of purple. There's a feral look on her face, and in her right hand is a knife. An alien with green fur is shown in the mid-ground, lying unconscious on the ground to the left of the painting. They have one hand outstretched and a vague look of pain on their face. The two are in a dimly lit Galran arena, with a crowd visible in the background. In the upper left corner are the words "One Foot in the Battledome" written in a clean, white font. In smaller text of the same font and color, the words "by Ink_Beneath_Her_Fingernails" are written directly below the title. In the bottom right corner, it is signed "Loz" in white.]
> 
> [ **ID 3:** A digitally drawn picture, split diagonally from the bottom left corner to the top right corner with a thin black line. In the upper left half is Pidge. Her hair is up in a side ponytail on her right. Small scars are on her face, with one under her right eye, and two on her left cheek that go off the side of her face. She is dressed in the black and grey undersuit to the Paladin armor, and has a look of hardened rage on her face. Her mouth is opened slightly to speak. In the bottom right half is the head of the Black Lion, with dim eyes. In the background of both sides, the neon blue lines of lights in the hangar are visible against the grey metal walls.]  
> 
> 
> • as for what zarkon references in the opening: according to the voltron wiki, trigel was from the dalterion belt, blaytz's home planet was nalquod, and gyrgan's was rygnirath. I took liberties with the terminology accordingly.
> 
> • I live for ulaz becoming buds with the paladins
> 
> • the math isn't that complicated but I double-checked it several times bc I’m paranoid and if I find out it's wrong after posting I might just cry
> 
> • yes, pidge stabs zarkon in the throat with a rebar. no, I don’t have an explanation. at the very least it’s better than what he gets in the black paladin hunk fic (which _is_ still coming, it’s just,,, a beast that I am having a lot of trouble taming atm) ((also hmu if you’d be down to beta that wip 👀))
> 
> • am I projecting my frustrations with languages onto poor pidge? mayhaps
> 
> • zarkon gets to use contractions bc he’s had several thousand years to get a handle on the nuances of a language he was already conversationally fluent in as it developed, while ulaz a) hasn’t and b) really just can’t be bothered tbh
> 
> • to clarify the broad timeline in case that got confusing: the kids go to space about a year after the Kerberos mission goes south, pidge went to the garrison about 6 months after Kerberos, after the kids go to space everything's just peachy for another 6 months or so, then pidge goes to the galra, she's with them for seven years, and after she gets out, it's another year and a half or so of running around the universe trying to deliver debilitating blows to the galra (zarkon dies about 6 months into this period), so by the time they're back on earth, it's been ~9 years since they left earth, and ~10 years since Kerberos.
> 
> • sorry about sam and shiro :(
> 
> • again, tons of love to Loz and Moo!! the art pieces Loz made are just stunning, and I'm so honored to pair this fic with them! also. I feel like it's important for you all to know that this fic would've been an Actual Dumpster Fire without Moo's input. seriously. they both worked some serious magic and I can't thank them enough for that <3  
> 
> 
>   
> [come yell at me on tumblr :)](https://ink-beneath-her-fingernails.tumblr.com/)


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